Jefferson Davis’ Hope for a Future Union Based on Confederate Principles

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Davis expresses his hope for a future Union based on Confederate principles: “…The sentiment to which you refer as ‘common,’ is I hope the utterance of time serving self seekers, rather than of the people who dared and did and sacrificed so much for principle, and the rights their Fathers left them. I trust your four boys will imbibe the patriotism of their Father and when in the fullness of time the restoration shall come that they may enjoy the blessings of liberty and community independence which the Constitution of the Union was designed to secure. With this I enclose the autograph for which you asked…”

After the North’s retreat from Reconstruction, Davis’s vision of individual rights, limited government, and white racial superiority still held great sway in the South.

Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) President of the Southern Confederacy. A West Point officer who served with distinction in the Mexican American War, Davis was President Pierce’s Secretary of War. Elected to the U.S. Senate, Davis resigned when Mississippi seceded in 1861. He organized the Confederacy under a strong, centralized rule that frustrated many Southern leaders who had argued for states’ rights. He faced charges of treason and imprisonment at the end of the Civil War, but was not prosecuted, because his trial would have taken place in Virginia where a jury might refuse to convict him. In his later years Davis wrote his memoirs, “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.”